Martín Porres Biography

Saint Martín de Porres (1579–1639) spent his entire life
in Lima, Peru. A Dominican monk known as a healer and an indefatigable
worker in charitable service to the poor, Martín was canonized
in 1962 by Pope John Paul XXIII, who designated him the patron saint
of universal brotherhood.

Always a famous figure within Latin American Catholicism, Martín
began to receive renewed attention in the later years of the twentieth
century. Partly this was due to his mixed-race background; he was one of a
comparatively small number of Catholic saints who could be classified as
black, and he ministered without distinction to Spanish nobles and to
slaves recently brought from Africa. Another fascinating aspect of
Martín's life and legacy has emerged from the fund of
miraculous legends that surround his memory. Such legends are not unique
to Martín, but he was clearly a religious leader with a perennial
appeal to the popular imagination. Finally, Martín's
sometimes defiant attachment to the ideal of social justice achieved deep
resonance in a church attempting to carry forward that ideal in
today's modern world.

Born to Freed Panamanian-Born Slave

Martín de Porres was born in Lima, Peru, on December 9, 1579. His
father was a Spanish conquistador named Don Juan de Porres and his mother
was a freed slave from Panama, of African or possibly part Native American
descent, named Ana Velázquez. Seeing that the child had African
rather than European features, Don Juan de Porres refused to acknowledge
his paternity. Martín was baptized the day he was born, with
notation on the baptismal certificate reading "father
unknown" (it is quoted in full by J.C. Kearns in
The Life of Blessed Martín de Porres
). He was raised by his mother in extreme poverty, on the very lowest
rungs of early Spanish colonial society; in the eyes of the nobility, a
mark of illegitimacy was exceeded in shamefulness only by a child's
racially mixed heritage.

Stories of Martín's remarkable generosity apparently began
to surround him even in childhood; sent to the local market by his mother,
he would often give away the contents of his basket to homeless persons
before reaching home. By the time he was 10 he was spending several hours
of each day in prayer, a practice he maintained for the rest of his life.
He once asked his landlady for the stumps of some candles she had
discarded, and she later saw him using their meager light to behold a
crucifix before which he knelt, weeping. Perhaps as a result of the
boy's spiritual accomplishments, Don Juan de Porres acknowledged
when Martín was eight years old that he was Martín's
father, a remarkable admission at the time. (He finally abandoned Ana
Velázquez for good after the birth of another daughter.) Ana
recognized in her son the signs of an intense spiritual quality, and she
tried to obtain for him an education beyond mere subsistence level. When
Martín was 12, he was apprenticed to a barber—a profession
that in sixteenth-century society involved much more than cutting hair.
Young Martín learned the rudiments of surgery: administering herbal
remedies, dressing wounds, and drawing blood—something that was
thought to be curative at the time.

At 15, Martín decided to devote himself to the religious life. He
applied to join the Convent of the Rosary in Lima, a Dominican monastery.
Racial restrictions dictated that he be given the position of
"tertiary" or lay helper, which he enthusiastically
accepted. The bishop at the monastery, according to an early biography
quoted by Alex García-Rivera in
St Martín de Porres
, said that "there are laws that we must respect. These indicate
that the Indians, blacks, and their descendants, cannot make profession in
any religious order, seeing that they are races that have little formation
as of yet." Martín was able to exercise his medical skills
after being put in charge of the monastery infirmary, and he was often
given the monastery's basic chores such as cleaning, cooking, and
doing laundry.

Both before and after joining the monastery, Martín suffered
incidents of harassment that may well have been racially motivated. The
monks for whom he was cooking would hide the kitchen's potholders,
and one of the early stories surrounding the young holy man was that he
could then pick up the pots with his bare hands and not be burned. Another
story concerned Martín's tendency toward
self-denial—or, read another way, his determination to identify
himself with the lives of Peru's indigenous poor. Told by his
superior to retire to bed, Martín responded (according to Kearns),
"What! Do you command me, who at home would never have enjoyed the
luxuries of life, to betake myself to a soft bed! Father, I beseech you,
do not force me to enjoy such an unmerited gratification." Cleaning
a toilet one day, he was asked by a monk whether he might not prefer life
at the splendid offices of the Archbishop of Mexico. Martín
responded, according to Kearns, by quoting the biblical Psalm 83:
"I have chosen to be an abject in the house of my God rather than
to dwell in the tabernacles of sinners." He qualified this remark
by saying that he was not referring to the Archbishop as a sinner, but
rather simply that he himself preferred menial tasks. He wore robes until
they fell apart, refusing the luxury of new ones.

Religious Devotion Celebrated in Stories

When Martín was 24, in 1603, he gave the profession of faith that
allowed him to become a Dominican brother. He is said to have several
times refused this elevation in status, which may have come about due to
his father's intervention, and he never became a priest. As with
any other famous holy man, Martín's life is surrounded by
stories, and those stories constitute the primary means of remembering him
at a distance of four centuries. The stories surrounding Martín are
of two kinds. Some consist of testimony about his character and
accomplishments by church officials who knew him, while others seem to be
of a more popular character, arising among Lima's impoverished
populace, and coming down to the present time partly via oral tradition.

Many stories attest to Martín's exceptional piety. He was
said sometimes to be surrounded by a bright light when
he prayed, and to be levitated off the floor of a chapel by sheer
religious ecstasy. He subsisted for days on bread and water and would do
penance for sins by whipping himself with chains. Martín was said
to be capable of bilocation (being in two places at once), and individuals
from both Africa and Mexico swore that they had encountered him in their
home villages even though he was never known to have left Lima. Patients
under his care spoke on several occasions of his having walked through
locked doors in order to render medical help.

Other tales of the miracles and wonders worked by Martín, however,
were more specific to his time and place. He was said to have a
supernatural rapport with the natural world. The most famous single story
connected with Martín had to do with a group of mice (or rats) that
infested the monastery's collection of fine linen robes.
Martín resisted the plans of the other monks to lay poison out for
the mice. One day he caught a mouse and said (in the rendering of Angela
M. Orsini of San Francisco's Martín de Porres House of
Hospitality, one of many institutions and schools in the United States
named after the Peruvian healer), "Little brothers, why are you and
your companions doing so much harm to the things belonging to the sick?
Look; I shall not kill you, but you are to assemble all your friends and
lead them to the far end of the garden. Everyday I will bring you food if
you leave the wardrobe alone"—whereupon Martín lead a
Pied Piper-like mouse parade toward a small new den. Both the mice and
Martín kept their word, and the closet infestation was solved for
good. Martín loved animals of all kinds and seemed to have unusual
skills in communicating with them. He would apply his medical skills to
the treatment of a wounded dog found wandering the streets with the same
energy he would devote to a sick human. Paintings of Martín often
depicted him with a mouse, dog, or cat—or sometimes with a broom,
symbolizing his devotion to everyday tasks.

Ministered to the Poor and Sick

Many other stories of Martín's goodness pertained to his
unwavering efforts to help Lima's poor and ill, often against the
wishes of his superiors at the monastery. A sick, aged street person,
almost naked and covered with open sores, was taken by Martín to
his own bed at the monastery. A fellow monk was horrified, but
Martín responded (according to the Lives of the Saints reported on
the website of Canada's Monastery of the Magnificat),
"Compassion, my dear Brother, is preferable to cleanliness. Reflect
that with a little soap I can easily clean my bed covers, but even with a
torrent of tears I would never wash from my soul the stain that my
harshness toward the unfortunate would create."

He treated victims of bubonic plague without regard to whether they were
white, black, or Native American. During one plague outbreak he brought a
wounded Native American man into the monastery for treatment even though
the Superior administrator of the province had forbidden the admission of
the sick owing to fears of contagion. Given a reprimand for disobedience,
Martín replied (according to the Monastery of the Magnificat site),
"Forgive my error, and please instruct me, for I did not know that
the precept of obedience took precedence over that of charity."
Martín's skills as a physician spread his name far and wide,
and even the Archbishop of Mexico came to Lima to seek his services at one
point. He was said to have a miraculous ability to know whether or not a
patient would recover. Sometimes he sent sick people (or animals) to the
home of his sister Juana when the monastery's facilities were
overwhelmed.

Martín was, in the words of Richard Cardinal Cushing (writing in
St. Martín de Porres
), "a precursor of modern social science," and the Convent
of the Rosary while he was there "became the forerunner of the
modern medical clinic." To finance all these activities,
Martín also became an early specialist in the art of nonprofit
fundraising. Spanish nobles gave him large donations so that he could
continue his work, and one estimate placed his weekly disbursements of
funds at the level of $2,000, an astonishing sum for the period.
Martín did not devote these funds exclusively to those in misery,
but also tried to level class distinctions. For example, he sometimes
provided money for a poor young woman's dowry so that she could
marry. When the monastery's finances suffered as a result of his
activities, Martín responded (according to
American Catholic's
Saint of the Day website), "I am only a poor mulatto. Sell me. I
am the property of the order. Sell me."

Martín died of a fever in Lima on November 3, 1639, at the age of
nearly 60. Despite his renown throughout Latin America, recognition from
the Catholic church was slow to come. In 1837 he was beatified, and his
feast day is celebrated on November 3. He was canonized as a saint by Pope
John XXIII on May 6, 1962, with a contingent of 350 African-American
Catholics in attendance. Both Kearns and Cushing called Martín
"a pioneer social worker," and when canonized he was
designated the patron saint of universal brotherhood. On a more earthly
plane, he was also the patron saint of interracial relations, social
justice, public education, Peruvian television and public health, trade
unions in Spain, mixed-race individuals, and barbers and hair stylists in
Italy.